Since the 1950s, the world of high tech has been promising, or threatening, that computers would provide significantly increased Return On Investment (ROI) and measurable competitive advantage to those companies wise enough to invest heavily in computers within the infrastructure of their business operations. While most Fortune 500 companies bought into this assertion, few if any of them saw any significant increase in productivity, return on investment, or competitive advantage. Companies like IBM, GE, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDI, and Honeywell provided what would later be called mainframe computers that required special environmental and temperature controlled rooms along with an operational group to keep it up, and of course programmers if you wanted such computers to do anything. IBM dominated this group during the heyday of mainframe computing giving birth to the age of data processing along with the necessary aftermath—IT.
IT, or Information Technology, is the industry of professional software individuals who make their living feeding and taking care of the beast of computers dedicated to running the companies that represent the flagships of modern industry. As an industry, we have seen IT emerge from the early days of electronic data processing, to management information systems, to information systems to today's version of information technology. During this evolution, IT has seen the mainframe computer as a standalone device, later supplemented by minicomputer satellites, and later still threatened with replacement by huge versions of these mini-computers. The personal computer revolution made knowledge workers of just about every office employee, and once the PCs were connected to the world-wide-web (WWW), the revolution was on—globally.
Throughout all of this change, IT never became the keepers of the corporate infrastructure, the bastion of the implementation and automation of the killer business model. Not a single company overcame its competition based on an automated business model. If any company did, the media missed it. IT progressed smoothly in 10 years from the age of data processing to the information age. During this time, as technology changed, businesses were asked to reinvest in newer, more advanced technologies that worked on the more modern equipment and sometimes on new generation devices like mobile phones. The reputation of IT in general sagged through these years and IT became known for delivering applications that were too expensive to create and maintain completing systems late, and short of the specification goals committed to. The average IT project spanned 1-3 years and was already outdated by the time it was delivered.
Business's response to this was to get tough with funding and only implement industry standard systems. IT organizations were not trusted to ‘roll (or design) their own’ solutions, but were required to implement someone else's Enterprise grade software. The business units paying the tab required specific customizations, but these were functional business units that were not motivated to look at the bigger picture of the needs of the corporation, and thus only implemented parochial rather than universal solutions. Sales people had no idea as to the financial health of a prospect, because that information was stored in a system (an internal accounting system perhaps) that was not available to them.
IT in general was forced into a highly encumbered process of guaranteed deliveries in isolation from the customer needs. This made IT more successful, because it contained and controlled any risk they might have had to endure in the development process. Success was guaranteed, because the process was bulletproof. There was no reward for risk taking or innovation, and no reward for quick response to the ever changing needs of the business units.
Business Intelligence (or BI) has taken on the role of analyzing the oceans of data and information threatening to drown rather than inform the executives of business units. The approach has been to aggregate all data and information that might be important into a data warehouse. Cubes of this data can be statistically exercised by data analysts in the mere hopes of finding telling information that might better inform executives as to how to better shape their business model or take advantage of opportunities. This approach lacks the real time aspect of a neural network approach of distributed intelligence, and mostly disregards the modeling of what is important to watch in the IT application and data infrastructure.
The existing enterprise applications continue to function in the way they always have. There is no need to retrain, reinvent, or reprogram anything. Not everything needs to be integrated. There are mission critical processes in all business models and they provide the highest leverage in maximizing return with minimal incremental investment.
Wikipedia states in its Enterprise Application Integration entry that most EAI projects fail. A number of reasons are given including a paucity of consultants knowledgeable about middleware technology and the aspects of business models and processes, and how to “marry” them together. The most telling need is that most integrations are done to provide information to a single, isolated, but important application or function. Once you begin implementing in this fashion, you quickly realize that each connection you make is simply like another piece of thread in a garment. Documentation falls by the wayside early, and disaster strikes imminently. Wikipedia blames the lack of a common unifying structure as the core of the problem.
This invention, accordingly, provides that unifying structure in a network of distributed intelligence processors that can break us out of the Information Age and into the age of Intelligence exploitation. Creating plug ins to connect data and transaction sources to feed the intelligence system is done to whatever extent is necessary to provide guidance to the knowledge worker. This real-time decision support is based on information gathered via neural agents within the corporate infrastructure as interpreted by the rules assigned by the operational executive responsible for directing and utilizing the system.
This new approach to IT is based on the notion that you don't have to be an “authorized user” of a system within its core intention to need some of its data. It values the vision of the executives of the corporation as to the policies that should be enforced through the use of the company's automated systems, whether they were designed to operate together or not. It enables an unprecedented level of agility to the operational business units that use the various enterprise systems by reflecting changes in the rules of processing in real time, without reprogramming.